Drugs can finish you off in Japanese show business. One bust for possession spells the end to offers of every kind, from ad deals to drama-series roles to Christmas tree lightings. Theaters pull your latest film, your agency fires you and nobody wants to know you but your dog. In Hollywood, celebrity druggies often find professional redemption after going through rehab and confessing their sins to talk-show hosts. In Japan they often end up looking for another line of work.
When director Toshiaki Toyoda was arrested for possession of 3.9 grams of stimulants in August of 2005, he had just finished "Kuchu Teien" ("Hanging Garden"), a black dramady about a dysfunctional family that has made a ritual of truth-telling, while living lies. This funny, unsparing, poignant film was released to rave reviews (including one from me), but Toyoda went into the twilight for four years. (Not to prison, though: He was given a two-year suspended sentence. The justice system, unlike show business, tends to be lenient on first-time drug offenders.)
I wasn't terribly surprised by his arrest, to be honest. Toyoda had long taken outlaws, punks and other marginals as his subjects, starting with his 1998 feature debut "Pornostar" and continuing with the documentary "Unchain" (2001), the dystopian high school drama "Aoi Haru" ("Blue Spring," 2002) and the road movie "Nine Souls" (2003). Not as an anthropologist, either, keeping a safe distance from his subjects, but as a fellow rebel who not only sympathized with but partook of life on the social and, as it turned out, legal edge.